Forced price matching could be considered a abuse of their position. If a dev cannot sell on another store for less (even if that platform takes a smaller cut) then that makes reduces the need for others to use a different platform to get a cheaper deal. Devs cannot use pricing to save you some money while drawing you to a platform that gives them a larger margin. All of which means that there is less incentive for valve to reduce their cut of the sale to be more competitive. This is what some lawsuits against valve are arguing ATM I believe.
Yes (or at least it was how it used to be, don’t know if it has changed) if you were selling steam keys outside of steam you should price match the steam price. If you are distributing the game some other way you can set any price you want.
I don’t play enough games to have a poney in this race, but why do you care if you are already using Epics platform for some games? What benefits does steam platform bring that others don’t?
Valve supports Proton which allows any game in you library to be played with on Linux or even on Mac if your device can run it
Common redistributables which automatically get installed for the player if needed
Notification system
in game micro transaction handling through Steam
Multiplayer API’s you can hook into (like matchmaking)
A complete stat and achievement system
Chat and friends system
Steam cloud for save games
Steam input, so controllers just work for your game (even Epic will point you to this)
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Error reporting
HTML API so you can show HTML pages in your game
Persistent inventory system
Key system so you can give them away, or sell them on other platforms
Leader boards
Remote play (couch co-op over the internet)
Voice chat
Steam Workshop
Valve anti-cheat (VAC)
Steam VR layer that allows any vr device, even has a controller remapper build in
A customer support team that will actually help you, the customer, instead of throwing roadblocks left, right and center
The store has a gift option, Epic does not (as far as I know), so you can buy a game for someone else and gift it to them via Steam
Epic has:
A store, that has popups and pulls straight back to the store which is very annoying
Multiplayer (EOS), which is free for anyone to use
Unreal Engine
A CEO that actively shits on things Valve related and in the past has shared his dislike for Linux
Epic has had plenty of time to copy the success of Steam by just using their blueprint, but they won’t switch to being customer friendly, so instead Tim Sweeny (Epic CEO) is just hating on them (Valve). The other launchers are just terrible to begin with, the EA launcher has been buggy from the start and really unstable, Uplay is equally as bad. The only real competitor is GOG in my opinion, but they are small in comparison to Steam.
I’ve seen this being said mostly on reddit but haven’t seen any source/reference to this claim. Is this like an NDA that devs sign ? Has anyone reported on this/archived it ?
I typed “found it” after just seeing the post/headline on lemmy, but reading through the article, the allegations are from Ubisoft and fucking WB for 2 of their micro transaction heavy games. I don’t think this is what many people were lead to believe with the comments here. I initially thought the allegations were from poor indie devs. I don’t fucking care what Ubisoft and WB does, they are not saints either.
Forced price matching could be considered a abuse of their position. If a dev cannot sell on another store for less (even if that platform takes a smaller cut) then that makes reduces the need for others to use a different platform to get a cheaper deal. Devs cannot use pricing to save you some money while drawing you to a platform that gives them a larger margin. All of which means that there is less incentive for valve to reduce their cut of the sale to be more competitive. This is what some lawsuits against valve are arguing ATM I believe.
But that rule is only when using steam keys for distribution on other platforms no?
Yes (or at least it was how it used to be, don’t know if it has changed) if you were selling steam keys outside of steam you should price match the steam price. If you are distributing the game some other way you can set any price you want.
I think this is true, because I’ve definitely seen games on sale at Epic that have lower price than their Steam version.
But then I get into the quandry if I want to “own” it on Epic’s platform over Steam, and I usually don’t 🫤
I don’t play enough games to have a poney in this race, but why do you care if you are already using Epics platform for some games? What benefits does steam platform bring that others don’t?
All the extra’s it brings;
Epic has:
Epic has had plenty of time to copy the success of Steam by just using their blueprint, but they won’t switch to being customer friendly, so instead Tim Sweeny (Epic CEO) is just hating on them (Valve). The other launchers are just terrible to begin with, the EA launcher has been buggy from the start and really unstable, Uplay is equally as bad. The only real competitor is GOG in my opinion, but they are small in comparison to Steam.
EDIT : Found it.
I’ve seen this being said mostly on reddit but haven’t seen any source/reference to this claim. Is this like an NDA that devs sign ? Has anyone reported on this/archived it ?
OK, where?
I forgot to share the url. It’s this one.
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I typed “found it” after just seeing the post/headline on lemmy, but reading through the article, the allegations are from Ubisoft and fucking WB for 2 of their micro transaction heavy games. I don’t think this is what many people were lead to believe with the comments here. I initially thought the allegations were from poor indie devs. I don’t fucking care what Ubisoft and WB does, they are not saints either.